


the desert road incarnate

by hotelbravo



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:50:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4042924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotelbravo/pseuds/hotelbravo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magic has a way of growing in the desert, in the vast open spaces where people once were. At first, Max has enough of himself left to be faintly aware that something odd is going on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The gist of the story is that somewhere along the line, Mad Max became immortal. Magic seeps into the desert to fill the spaces people left and he ends up kind of embodying that, ok, don’t look at me i’m just looking for a reason Max remembers being a cop when everyone has clearly been living in this post-apocalyptic wasteland their whole lives. SO. This fic is still in progress, but I wanted to post the first part in order to convince myself to finish the other four. It’s kind of a “five times Max knew something he had no earthly way of knowing unLESS HE’S SECRETLY SUPER OLD” fic.

At first, Max has enough of himself left to be faintly aware that something odd is going on - there are always cars, and parts, abandoned right where he needs them; his tank seems to hover on just above empty, no matter how many miles he drives; he walks away from battles that should, by rights, have left him dead in the sand. He eats rarely, and drinks even less, but his body continues to carry him forward. The sandstorms pass over and through him as if he was one of their own.

But as his mind slips into the desert and the road, becomes as feral as a cactus and toxic as a death adder, he forgets to notice the way he never quite runs out of bullets. Every explosion (of which there are many), every shot his enemies take, misses him by a hair - but the compulsion to survive overrides his desire to question it. The years slip away from him like the asphalt under his wheels. The voices have consumed him utterly.

\----------------

1\. 

Max is not built to stay, hasn't been for a lifetime now ― Furiosa seems to understand that, in the way they understand each other, and makes no move to stop him when he slips away from the life he knows would be on offer at the Citadel. 

He's not built to stay, but he's not quite built to stay away, either. Not anymore. Not entirely. 

He returns a hundred days later, his gas tank just above empty, carrying with him as an offering a set of spare wheels that he dug out of a wreckage two weeks ago. One hundred days is not a lot of time, but it's time enough for the Sisters (never Wives, never again) to begin to find places for themselves in their new Citadel.

Dag has the green thumb and the Keeper's bag, but it's Toast who has started making plans for drip irrigation, for rotating crops and engineering hanging gardens. The Organic Mechanic is long gone, dead on the road with Rictus and the others, so Cheedo takes her gentle nature and iron resolve to his surgery room. She's still scrubbing it clean when Max gets there, one hundred days in. He doesn't go visit her. 

Capable, though, is the only one among them who genuinely likes the warboys ― just boys now, Max supposes ― and allows pups and boys alike to follow her around and stare at her and whisper behind their hands about that last ride Joe took on the Fury Road. At first, they're in awe of her. But the longer she spends with the Blackthumbs, crawling around broken machinery and getting engine grease up to her elbows, the more they stop whispering and start talking to her, chattering away about this or that rig and trailing after her through the garage. 

Max is there when one of them calls out "Wife!" to get her attention, and the look she levels at the pup stops him dead.

"No," she says, with steel in her voice. "You will never call me that again. _Never_."

The pup's eyes are wide as saucers, and his friends are staring at him like he's about to be thrown off the tower. A hundred or so days ago, he might have been.

"You will call me Capable, or you will call me Sister, or you will call me nothing at all. Do you understand?"

The pup nods vigorously. Max gets the feeling Capable doesn't raise her voice to them very often.

"Good." She wipes the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a black streak in its wake. "Now get out, all of you, garage is closed for today." She smiles at Max. "We've got a guest."

There's dinner in the canteen, with real genuine food at a real table, but Max doesn't remember how to eat like this. He knows he did once ― has vague memories of a place where you could buy any food you liked, and lots of it, without having to fight anyone for it, but he thinks that must have been a fever dream of the desert. This is the closest he's come to that dream while awake, though.

He hunches over his soup and forgoes the spoons the Sisters use, opting instead to slurp noisily from the bowl. It's loud in here, and there are too many people at his back, but Furiosa is sitting across from him and he trusts her to watch out for threats. 

"So how's training going, Toast?" Dag asks, taking a sip of water. There's water everywhere, these days. Max notices that the swell of Dag's belly is starting to show, that she seems more on edge now than she did when they were on a rig with bullets flying past their heads. 

"Slow," Toast admits, sharing a grin with one of the surviving Vuvalini. "But it's coming along. I came _this_ close to kicking Hippolyta's ass today."

The old woman named Hippolyta, apparently, laughs and knocks Toast's shoulder with her own. "You wish, girlie," she says with a rasp in her voice. "You couldn't fight your way out of a wet paper bag. But we'll keep working on it." She winks at Cheedo. "Maybe get some of your sisters in the ring, while we're at it."

"Better than learning to fight with the pups and the boys, that's for sure," another Vuvalini chimes in from down the table. "They just scrabble at each other, those ones. No finesse. In this world, if you're gonna keep up, you gotta know technique. That, my dears, is how you come out on top when the odds are stacked against you." 

Capable looks pained at the reminder that her boys still fight and die to defend the Citadel ― not so much now that things have quieted with Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, but there are still raiding parties that think a water palace run by a bunch of women would make a good target. They've all been wrong so far.

"You started off young in Swaddle Dog, isn't that right?" Hippolyta asks Furiosa. Furiosa's eyes flicker with the pain of old memories, but Max watches her catch herself, watches her remember that it is safe to talk about such things now. 

"Yes, we did. I started training with my mother when I was eight." She smiles, and it's all teeth. "She taught me everything she knew, and she knew a hell of a lot."

"Aye, Katie was a fierce one," the other Vuvalini says with a laugh. "Me, I learned to fight from a woman named Savannah, when I was just a slip of a girl. Long before I ever came to the Many Mothers."

"You fight like someone who knows how, Max," Furiosa says. "Where'd you learn?"

"I was a cop," Mad says without thinking.

He doesn't really know what it means, but he knows it to be true, somewhere deep in his bones. There are a lot of words like that in his head, that have no meaning he remembers but just flow together like they're meant to be that way.

Capable's brow creases. "A cop? What's a cop?"

Max shrugs and slurps his soup. 

"I remember the word "cop" from when I was a girl," Hippolyta says. "We used to play a game called cops and robbers, once upon a time. Did you ever do that, Basil?" The other Vuvalini ― Basil, it seems ― nods thoughtfully. "Even back then I don't think we really knew what a cop was, though." 

"Well, I know what a 'robber' is," Cheedo offers. Max hums low in his throat.

"Cops are people who stop robbers," he grunts at last. "Stop bad people in general, I think."

"And you were one of them?" Toast asks. Max shrugs again. Basil is staring at him now with a considering look in her eye. He doesn't care for it. They're all staring at him. He can feel his skin start to itch.

"Well, I'm all done," Furiosa says abruptly, setting her empty bowl on the table with a clunk of wood. The sound jerks Max out of his own self-awareness and he gives his head a shake, looks up at her. She raises an eyebrow at him. "You want to come with me and scope out the South wall defenses? I could use another eye." 

Max knows she's lying. In fact, probably everybody at this table knows that she doesn't really need his help, but if it'll get him away from this road his brain's started down ( _I was a cop I was a cop I was I was I used to be_ ) then he will take the lie. It's a kind one, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

2\. 

Dag spends the rest of her pregnancy trying valiantly to pretend that there’s no baby coming, and that even if babies were a thing that happened to people, in general, she wouldn’t care at all if it were a boy or a girl. 

“It’s going to be ugly either way,” she says with a snarl. The pregnancy hormones and her own fear have made her prickly and restless. Whenever the Sisters try to bring up the impending baby she snaps at them like a coyote, hemmed in and fierce.

Furiosa offers her a way out, once. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she says quietly, hand brushing against her own belly involuntarily. There is a reason Furiosa became an Imperator instead of a Wife. It has everything to do with her ability to drive a rig like she was born for it, like she was made of nothing but wheel spikes and guzzoline, but that is not how she first escaped childbearing duties. “Say the word. It’s your call.”

Dag doesn’t answer right away. She doesn’t answer for a good four days, actually, and in the meantime Furiosa doesn’t seek her out. She understands the need for time. On the fourth day, Dag finds her in the garage, elbow deep in a recalcitrant engine.

“I’m keeping it,” she says, with quiet conviction. Doesn’t make eye contact. “It’s mine, and ours, not his.”

“Okay then,” Furiosa says.

“This baby is going to have many mothers, and no father,” Dag says, “and it is going to be perfect. It is going to grow up in a green place and it is _never_ going to be anything like _him_.” If Furiosa notices the way Dag’s voice shakes, like she’s trying to convince herself, she doesn’t comment on it. Just sets down her socket wrench and draws Dag into an awkward, half-metal embrace - affection isn’t comfortable for her, probably never will be, but she’s been trying to make an effort. For their sakes. And as Dag presses her face into Furiosa’s shoulder and shakes and definitely doesn’t cry at all, Furiosa can admit that it’s a little for her own sake as well.

Dag is right, as usual. The baby is perfect. She has ten little fingers and ten little toes, and two blue eyes that are the mirror of her mother’s, and Dag promptly names her Angharad and loves her completely.

Max doesn’t meet her until he comes stumbling back five months later - a long gap, by their standards, but not so long as to get Furiosa worrying just yet.

He squints down at the squalling bundle of baby girl that Dag presents him with and hums approvingly, deep in his chest. He lets her wrap her whole tiny hand around one rough finger. “Good grip,” he says.

“Her name is Angharad,” Dag says. Angharad makes a noise, a happy baby burble, and Furiosa sees the way Max jerks at the sound like he’s been shot.

Dag hasn’t quite noticed that he’s gone completely still, his breathing shallow. “She can hold her head up now, all on her lonesome,” she says proudly, “and she evens sleeps through the night sometimes.” Angharad makes the noise again, a nonsense collection of _ba-ba-da_ gurgles and Max slams his eyes shut against something only he can see.

Furiosa could make an educated guess at what put that look on his face. She’d rather not.

Instead, she steps up and puts her metal hand on his shoulder, doesn’t miss the way he flinches a little at the contact. “I need Max to look at something in the garage for me,” she says. “Tell Capable to meet us there?”

Dag has figured out by now that something is not quite right, but she just nods and gently extracts Max’s finger from Angharad’s grip. Furiosa leads him away and doesn’t say anything about the way his eyes jump from place to place, the way he twitches at shadows as they walk down the corridor. He doesn’t stay in the Citadel long, that time.

He comes back, though - once, twice, three times, with shorter absences in between. He brings back baubles in primary colors, mostly pieces of glass that were melted and fused together by explosions, then worn smooth by the desert winds. On his direction, Capable strings them together under a bit of broken-off exhaust pipe and hangs them above Angharad’s bed.

“You’re spoiling her,” Furiosa teases. It’s easier to breathe, these days. Easier to be amused at the idea of Max going into the desert and bringing back shiny little toys like it’s his job.

“Good,” Max says.

Cheedo loves to watch the light play off of them almost as much as Angharad does. “It’s so pretty,” she says, sticking her hand out and letting the glass turn her skin blue, red, orange. Angharad, ten months old now and mimicking everything her mothers do, sticks her own hand out and laughs at the yellow on her fingers. The side of Max’s mouth twitches upwards in a half smile.

The Sisters have laid claim to the warren of Immortan Joe's old rooms, after burning every trace of him out of them. The central chamber now is light and airy, with Angharad's crib in the middle and space for Dag's plants, Toast's projects, Cheedo's medical books that she dug out of some hidden cabinet in the Organic Mechanic's old surgery. The bedrooms off the main room are largely unoccupied. There's the Sisters' room, which is by far the largest; two days after moving in, by silent and mutual agreement, all four of them pushed their beds together and have been sleeping as one ever since. The other chambers stand empty aside from Furiosa's and the one that is quietly reserved for Max. 

He still doesn’t stay long, but he comes back more often, so it evens out. He’s back for a visit on the day that Furiosa returns from the garage and finds the Sisters clustered in the hallway, ears pressed to the door of their chambers, eyes wide.

“Shh!” Capable hisses at her before she even has the chance to say anything. She beckons Furiosa over with one hand, finger to her lips. Toast’s face is screwed up in a look of utter concentration, brows furrowed.

Furiosa leans in, listening carefully, and hears what must’ve brought the Sisters to a screeching halt. It’s a low, rough voice, not a beautiful one by a long shot, doing something she only vaguely remembers from her time at the Green Place.

“What’s a ‘river’?” Toast whispers.

“Shh!” Capable says again.

“And what’s a 'boat’?”

“I said, _shh_!”

“What’s he _doing_?” Cheedo wonders.

“He's singing,” Furiosa says.

The four of them turn to stare at her as one. In the background, Furiosa can hear Angharad’s hiccuping sniffles, as if she’s just been wailing her little lungs out. Max’s voice rumbles on.

“ _Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes_ …”

The girls have only ever heard the pounding of the war drums and the distorted roar of the Doof’s guitar. The battle chants of the warboys are nothing like this, nothing that would ever soothe a crying baby girl. It’s barely got a tune but it seems to do the job.

“We used to sing in the Green Place, sometimes,” Furiosa tells them in a low voice. “Songs about our people, mostly. Never heard this one.”

“Angharad was napping, so I went to the canteen,” Capable says. “She must’ve woken up when I was coming back and Max was the only one around.”

Toast still looks like she’s trying to solve a puzzle. “But what’s 'tangerine’?”

Furiosa shrugs. “No idea.”

“Do you think he’ll teach us?”

Cheedo’s voice is a little too loud, and the low growl of Max’s singing grinds to a halt. Furiosa raises her eyebrows at Cheedo, who winces and mouths “sorry” to the other girls.

Well, there’s no point in hiding in the hallway any longer. Furiosa pushes open the door to the Sisters’ chambers, and all five of them tumble in to greet Max, who’s still crouched over Angharad’s crib. Toast, predictably, wastes no time.

“What’s a kaleidoscope?” she demands.

Max grunts and straightens up. “Bits of glass in a tube. Like those,” he says, nodding toward the pieces of Angharad’s colorful mobile. “You look through the tube and it’s all lit up.”

“Kaleidoscope eyes,” Toast says with satisfaction. “I like it.”

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Cheedo asks. “Is that a song from your people, like Furiosa’s used to have in the Green Place?” Max’s gaze darts to Furiosa. He looks, for a moment, profoundly helpless.

“Dunno,” he says finally. His voice is flat.

“You don’t know?” Cheedo sounds surprised - probably because that song was so strange and wonderful, an unknown, that the idea of not knowing how you came by it is confounding.

“Don’t remember. ’S old.”

“Can you teach it to us?” Dag asks, scooping up Angharad in her arms. She sits near Max, but not too close to him. They all know enough about needing space, sometimes.

Max is clearly getting jumpy, clearly plans to say no, but as his eyes dart from place to place he catches how the Sisters are staring at him hungrily, eyes wide, so hopeful. Instead he hums low under his breath.

“…Maybe.” he says finally.

Cheedo’s face lights up and Toast grins, delighted at the prospect of learning something new.

Furiosa waits until the next morning, when his provisions are packed and he’s loading extra guzzoline in the back of his V8. She finds him in the garage and leans against the doorframe, waiting.

She doesn’t ask, because she’s not there to ask. They are people of actions and loud silences, the two of them, not words, but she understands that sometimes you need to say something to somebody other than the ghosts in your own head. If she’s wrong, she’s wrong. But she doesn’t think she is.

He finishes loading the car and sits in the driver’s seat, door open, feet on the ground. His shoulders are hunched.

“It’s - I don’t remember. I don’t remember it.” He says finally, sounding uncertain and, for a moment, impossibly old. His voice creaks like the rig used to sometimes, in the high winds on the open desert. Metal grinding on metal. “But I think there was a girl.”

“A girl?”

“A girl. A woman.” He pauses, working something over in his fractured mind. “She loved that song, once. A long time ago.”

He says it like he’s trying it out on his own ears. Furiosa finds herself wondering, not for the first time, where Max came from and how long he’s been a part of the desert. How long the desert’s been a part of him.

He nods to her curtly, then swings his legs into the car and slams the door shut, peeling off into the distance.

It takes him a while to come back, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so close. SO CLOSE. to using AC/DC for this. Because first of all, AC/DC would fit 10000% into Max’s 70′s Australian leather-wearing rock persona, and secondly because I love the idea of singing “highway to hell” to calm a crying baby, but there aren’t a lot of words in an AC/DC song that people living in the post-apocalyptic outback wouldn’t know. Surprisingly. Also I picked Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds because it is basically one small step up from talking and Mad Max is not, in any version of any world, a good singer.
> 
> In addition, I know the wives have a piano in their chambers, but I figure that the piano is more of a sculpture/art piece than an instrument, like Joe found the empty husk of a grand piano on a raid of some kind (the hammers having rotted away and the wires appropriated for garrotes or something) and brought it back for decoration. I can’t imagine that there are people left at this point that know how to play one or keep it functioning. So the piano’s just for show, and there might be _some_ forms of music in this future world but they don't sound a thing like the beatles, which is why they're so confounded by it, and you can’t prove me wrong so there.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

The Citadel is emblazoned in Max's mind like a beacon, and no matter where he goes or how long he drives he always knows exactly what direction it lies in. It anchors him. For the first time in a long time, he has a point of reference.

Max takes to returning with offerings, like a wayward cat bringing prizes to its owner. At first it's supplies ― wheels, iron, guns stripped from those who would use them for harm ― but soon enough the road begins to whisper to him, taking him to those who could use the Sisters' brand of help. 

He follows the buzzing in his blood and it pushes him onward, tells him where to go: past that dune, two days' drive, through the canyon, that cave there, yes, there, free them ― he runs down the Motorhead sentry at the mouth of the cave before the man can even register what's happening, puts a bullet in the brain of the man who rages out of the darkness of the cave with his knife drawn. 

He turns just in time to avoid a lead pipe to the back of the head but it slams into his shoulder and he drops the gun with a grunt, whirls instead to punch the Motorhead in the gut and watch him go down gasping. 

The last one runs. Mounts his bike and guns it into the canyon, skidding behind a boulder before Max can get a hand on his gun and driving off as fast as he can. Max listens to the roar of his engine fade into the distance, then looks at the Motorhead struggling to get to his feet. A swift kick to the face puts him down for good.

In the cave, he finds exactly what he knew he would when he pointed his steering wheel north two days ago: they're shackled to the ground, the woman and her children, two boys and a girl. They stare up at him with gaunt faces from where they're huddled against the cave wall, her arms curled protectively around them. 

There's no fight in the woman's eyes ― only a cold acceptance that they have changed hands, that their hell has a new face but is otherwise unaltered. The boys are older and have the same despair in their bones. The little girl, though, glares fiercely at him. She looks prepared to bite.

"Who are you?" the mother asks.

He considers the shackles at their feet, embedded in the rocky ground. He makes a low, considering grumble in his throat, then turns to relieve the unconscious Motorhead of his weapons: crowbar, pipe, two guns, a machete and a switchblade. He walks back to his car.

"Where are you going?" she says, an edge of fear in her voice. 

He rummages in the trunk of his car, paying no mind to the dead Motorhead under its wheels. He can hear one of the boys start to cry, and his mother shushing him, then the rasp of fabric on gravel that means someone is pushing themselves their feet. 

"What do you want?" the mother asks. She stands on shaky legs but she stands, which is good, because Max did not love the idea of carrying her. 

He comes up out of the trunk bearing bolt cutters, twins to the ones Nux used on him so long ago. The ones Dag used on Cheedo when he first laid eyes on the Sisters in the desert. The mother puts a hand to her children's heads and watches him wordlessly as he approaches.

"Hold still," he says. Then, as he cuts the chain with a grunt, he looks up. "I'm Max."

It's easier to say this time. 

The woman does not seem comforted by this knowledge, and neither do her hollow-eyed children. They all stare at him with a mixture of suspicion and fear, and he has no idea how to convince them to get in the car.

He cuts them all free, regardless, then stands back and puts his hands up, palms out.

"There's a safe place," he says finally, "not far, two days' drive." He wills them to believe him. "I will take you there. I won't hurt you."

He's covered in the blood and brain matter of a man he shot in front of them ten minutes ago. Dirt coats him from head to toe. He smells like gunpowder, like sweat, and like he's been driving for two days straight, largely because he has. He is aware that he does not cut a very trustworthy figure.

His fingers twitch against the handle of the bolt cutters in a one-two tattoo rhythm as a buzzing noise grows at the base of his skull, counterpoint to the litany in his mind ― _no harm no harm no harm_ believe _me_ ― until something suddenly changes in the mother's gaze.

"Fine," she says sharply. She draws her boys to their feet, holds the little girl's hand. "Fine, okay."

The buzzing disappears, Max lets his hands drop and the corner of his mouth curls upwards involuntarily. "What's your name?" he asks.

"Vevela," she says. 

He gives them what food he has, which isn't much, and the children sleep most of the drive there. Vevela hushes them when they stir, or when the little girl tries to ask him questions (she does manage to tell him that her name is Seven, before her mother yanks her back down into her seat). They all sit together in the back, out of reach, nevermind that it's viciously cramped, and when Max reaches the border of the Citadel he uses his mirror to signal the sentries ― three flashes, a pause, then one, then four.

"What is this place?" Seven asks eagerly, peering around where her brothers have their noses pressed to the window.

"What's all that green stuff?" the older one asks. It's the first time Max has heard him speak. Vevela is silent, and Max suspects that she may be in shock.

He stops just inside the walls, then gets out of the car and waits for Furiosa to appear. She doesn't disappoint.

He presses his forehead to hers in greeting and takes a moment to breathe her in, to let out some of the tension in his shoulders as she grips the back of his neck. Allows himself the indulgence of closing his eyes.

"Welcome back, fool." She grins at him when she pulls away, settling easily onto her heels and making room for Capable to materialize behind her. He nearly laughs at the sight of her ― someone, and he suspects Angharad, has been experimenting with face paint. Her cheek is a swirl of blue and orange with deliberate, child-size fingerprints dotting it in white.

"So what did you bring us this time?" Capable asks. "Toast's been hankering for a new plasma cutter, if you happen across one of those out there." 

"I'll keep it in mind," he says. He hears the squeak of the car door opening behind him, knows that Vevela and Seven and the boys must be piling out.

"Well," Furiosa says, surprise flitting across her face. "That's not a plasma cutter."

She walks past him and comes to a stop directly before Vevela, who is holding both her boys' hands tightly in her own. Seven clings to her leg but peers up at Furiosa from behind it.

Furiosa and Vevela consider each other for a moment, and then Furiosa smiles. It's a much more gentle expression now than it ever used to be. Max thinks she may have been practicing.

"I am Furiosa," she says, "and you are in the Citadel of the Sisters. You will be safe here."

Where Max can gain a grudging detente enough for only one car ride, Furiosa can find faith. She stands strong and tall, at home in the borderland of her domain, with her prosthetic gleaming in the sun and at least four knives strapped to her person that Max can count. Her flesh-and-blood hand rests easy on her hip, just above her gun holster. She looks untouchable.

Vevela stares at her for a moment longer, then releases one boy's hand and wraps her arm around his thin shoulders. 

"This is Nifo," she says of the older boy, then nods to the younger. "And this is Diesel. That's Seven."

"And you?" Furiosa asks.

"Vevela."

Seven disappears entirely behind her mother's leg, suddenly shy, but Nifo and Diesel stand their ground with something resembling awe on their faces.

Furiosa looks back over her shoulder at where Capable is standing, arms crossed, watching the newcomers with open fascination. She clears her throat.

"Right," Capable says, jolting abruptly to action. "Right, of course. You must be tired, coming all this way in that bucket of bolts." She sends a teasing grin Max's way and he grumbles his offense, obligingly. Seven peeps her head out from behind her mother's knee. 

"Come," Capable says, reaching out a hand. "Come and meet the others."

After a moment's hesitation, and with her eyes glued to the splash of color on Capable's cheek, Vevela takes it. 

This leaves Furiosa and Max at the edge of the Citadel, looking out over the open desert. The sun is just setting, dyeing the world a rust red and stretching the shadows of the dunes. They reach toward him like fingers. Behind them lies the Citadel, and the Sisters, and water enough to clean the blood out of his hair. 

He coughs and it comes up sand. He can feel that the wind's about to change, the hint of electricity in the air, the promise of a brewing storm that will turn the sky black while it lasts. It won't touch the Citadel. Not while he's here. 

"Storm's coming," he says anyway. Furiosa looks away from the cloudless horizon long enough to crook an eyebrow at him skeptically. "Might want to bring in your boys, if there's any on patrol." 

"We've had some problems with the Rock Riders," she says. "There's not much traffic coming through there for them, these days, so they're getting desperate. Mostly they're picking on the Buzzards but sometimes one or two'll come for us."

Max makes a low, noncommittal hum. She sighs.

"I'll bring 'em back. Come on, fool, you reek ― go soak your head before dinner or you'll stink up the whole joint."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been struggling a _lot_ with this story, lately. I think it's because I only ever saw the movie once and that was right after it came out - a rewatch is in order. Need to get these characters straight in my head again!
> 
> More elaborate story notes will be posted on my [tumblr](www.bimbonaparte.tumblr.com), if you're interested.

**Author's Note:**

> bits and pieces of this will probably make their way onto my [tumblr](http://bimbonaparte.tumblr.com) before they show up here, maybe see you there! :p


End file.
